The Aftermath of Alex Drake
by MeganBellaRoseBlack
Summary: For a while they had been thieves chasing time. But all thieves are punished in the end, and what better way to punish a couple of criminals than to tear them apart? One shot.


Gene had never thought that he, of all people, would end up falling for a bird. He'd heard countless men claim that they would never be seduced, that they'd be the last man standing when the others had fallen by the wayside and given into the powers of a good woman and many had even gone as far as to say they'd see _Gene_ married before themselves. But they had all been wrong. Sooner or later a crisp white envelope would fall through Genes' door and he would find himself being invited to share yet another happy couples happy day and have his nose rubbed in their blissful happiness. With a sigh, he'd soon be dusting off his suit and preparing to get thoroughly smashed at the expense of the sucker that had been coaxed into marriage. Not that they'd been coaxed as such. Gene had observed that it was often his self proclaimed bachelor friends that had been the one suggesting vows and babies and happy ever afters. So much for all that 'not me' shite. But when Gene had said 'piss off, I'll never have a ball and chain wrapped round me ankle', he had well and truly meant it. He saw now that perhaps all the others had too. Things had changed the moment that posh mouthy tart had bulldozed into his life, stamping her hooker heels all over his nice smooth plans of loneliness. Alex Drake wasn't like the other women he'd met before. She didn't fit nicely into any of the boxes he liked to mentally place his conquests into. These boxes were for his usual types; married and lonely, single and desperate, hooker or too drunk to see her face properly. These were the simpering, easy types that would do anything for a bit of the Gene Genie. Oh sure, there were the occasional ones that would pretend they weren't gagging for it and would make him work a little harder, but it wasn't any real effort. Throw them an extra drink, a lustful look and an extra chat up line and they were on their backs before he'd loosened his tie. Alex Drake was most definitely not going to sit nicely in one of those boxes. Right from the off, Gene had known she was trouble. There was lust from the get go, but that was quickly stamped out by an overwhelming urge to reach out, wrap his hands around her pretty little neck and throttle her. The woman never shut up and she never gave him a goddamn moments peace. He couldn't stand her, with her long legs and her brains and her ridiculously impractical clothes he was sure she just wore to tease him, and he longed for the days before his DI was a woman in ridiculous heels. That was the first thing that set alarm bells ringing in his head; when he started lying to himself. He'd once heard someone say - in fact it might have been the bloody queen of fruitcakes herself - that living a lie will reduce you to one, and he certainly felt like a lie now. No matter how many times he had told himself that the sight of her made his blood boil, that her shrill voice when she got angry gave him a headache, no matter how many times that the tea she made was appalling, at the end of the day came he always found himself offering her the chair opposite him and pouring her a glass of wine. 'This is how it starts, I suppose, Genie Boy' he had told himself one evening. 'Bottle of wine and a sneaky glance at her tits and then a ring on your finger before you've blinked'. Well they'd never quite got to the ring on the finger part, and the thought made Gene sigh deeply. There had been a twelve days - he'd say no if you were to ask him if he knew how many days it had been exactly. He'd be lying - when there had been something there. Something special. Something right. Something that made Gene know exactly why his friends had abandoned all hope and jumped into the wide oceans of 'love'. Oh it hadn't been Romeo and Juliet and their arguments had been fiercer than ever, but she'd released her inner lioness one night and lent over, allowing her hand to trail over his. He'd known what was going to happen with that gesture and so had she. And so they'd allowed themselves, for a short while, to snatch at the small moments of happiness that came their way. They'd stolen kisses and lingering glances, whispered sweet nothings and spent glorious hours together, just talking. No bravado, no pretence. Just him and her and the power of words. But all thieves must be punished and time had caught up with them pretty damn quickly. His vow of loneliness had well and truly bitten him on the arse and far too soon, she had turned from him and walked away into that blasted pub. What did he expect? That's what he'd told her to do and that's what she had gone and done. Bloody woman. Never listened to a word he said and the one time he wants - no, needs - her to tell him he's being a prick and there's no way she's going to follow his orders, she goes and flaming well obeys them without a backwards glance and Gene Hunt is left torn. He doesn't know what to think anymore, and it's a new sensation to him. He wants to carry on. He wants to forget her. He never wants to let her go. And so he does the only thing he can do and he walks back to the station and into his checkered wonderland that he had so carefully constructed, waiting for the next mad hatter to slip down the rabbit hole - he knew they'd come eventually. Physically, it looks exactly the same and if he hadn't of known better, he'd have expected Ray to come and collect a pack of fags from his desk drawer and walk past him in a cloud of nicotine heavy smoke. But it just didn't feel the same. Coldness seemed to hang heavy in the air and a thick wall of sadness sat behind Alex's desk in her place. It was a sadness that he knew he would never be able to budge. Tentatively making his way over to the desk boldly labelled 'DI Drake', he felt the unfamiliar feeling of uneasiness settle in his chest. This area of his world didn't seem to belong to him now and he almost felt like her were intruding by stepping into 'her' domain. But she wasn't here, and so could anything rightly be hers anymore? What use could she have with the pencil sharpener or stapler or notepad that sat waiting for her? Her swirled scribbles and doodles lay on an open page of her notebook, a mixture of stars and writing in her unmistakable handwriting. His fingers reached out and ghosted along the edge of her name plate, stopping briefly above the capital D of her surname and then dropping to his side, his gaze still on her desk. Moments passed and then Gene managed to pull his eyes away from her lonely looking chair and towards his glass box. The Lion's Den. For a while he had shared his small haven with her and it had become the Guv and Bolly's den. The office seemed to take on a life of it's own in those few days before Keats and Nelson and the Truth and he had begun to stop resenting the times that she would walk in there, close the door and pull the blinds without permission as if she owned the place. He started to think of his office as their calm in the middle of the hurricane of scum that swirled around them. They'd stayed after work a couple of times, revelling in the silence of CID after hours, kissing without any concern that someone would walk in on them. And even if they did, he didn't think he'd really give a damn because this wasn't some floozy in a too-tight top and too-short skirt, this was his Bolls. His fruitcake. His. They'd walked beneath the black and white chessboard hand in hand and he could still feel her light slap on his shoulder as she scolded him for a sexist remark. But she had still been laughing. There had been many laughs and many more drinks in those last 12 days when they had been thieves chasing time. In those days, it had seemed that they could do anything, be anything; the Lion and Lioness. The Guv and Bolls; facing the Devil together. Unbreakable. But now? Now it seemed like they had been stalked by fate all along, allowed a little bittersweet happiness before being ripped apart with a whispered goodbye. Gene hadn't known what to do with himself in the days and weeks that followed. Normally when another broken soul moved on, it was business as usual; add their name plate to the stack of others, ta very much for the memories and move on. But things weren't going to move on so smoothly this time. It wasn't just his DI that had gone on to the great bar in the sky this time. No, she'd taken his whole bloody team with her. Raymondo, who was quick with his fists but always one of the good guys, loyal, brave. Chris, not CID's brightest button by any means but always ready to learn and improve. Then there was Shaz with her scores and scores of potential, he pretended not to notice this things but he did, another life cruelly washed away. Gone from the real world and his. He should have known really; should have seen it coming. This one was never going to sort through her problems, put them in a box and tie it with a nice ribbon then bugger off for a glass of red without leaving behind a trail of devastation. And what a path of mess she'd caused. He'd gone back to her place above Luigis, nearly going down for a drink before he remembered she'd even caused him to bugger of back to Italy. Bloody woman. He didn't know how it was her fault, but he knew it bloody well was. He had a firmly rooted feeling that if Alex Drake had not turned up that day, things would have been very different for him right now. For a start, he would not be letting himself into her flat (was it hers now she was gone?) and running his hand over the well-worn leather of a jacket that had, he supposed, been passed from one dead woman to another. Being in her flat without her was almost surreal - he'd not been here without her since before she had arrived - and he decided that he most definitely didn't like it. He'd looked out her window onto the street and had wished on each car that passed by and lit up the night with it's headlights that she'd walk through the door again with a sigh and a clatter of keys as she dropped them on the table, but it turned out that wishes on headlights work no better than wishes on stars and Gene eventually retreated to her empty bed. He had been hoping that falling asleep in the newly familiar sheets that were hers would be easier than falling asleep in his bed at home, but it he quickly realised that no matter where you are, an empty bed makes for a hard night and it is safe to say that Gene Hunt didn't get much sleep that night. Gene had turned up the next day to find new officers sat at Chris, Ray and Shaz's desks flicking through files and waiting for commands. But no-one touched her desk. No-one dared disrupt the shrine to the famed Alex Drake. Pens remained chewed, nesting in the pot; a spare pair of stockings stood sentinel in her top draw. The new team were annoyingly wary of every move they made: nobody spoke unless spoken to, paperwork was silently filled in until he barked orders for them to attend a scene, nobody corrected anyone, there were no raised voices or disapproving looks and Gene longed for someone to stand up to him and start an explosive argument. This new team were perhaps the most efficient he ever had, but there was still a 5'10" D-cup hole that needed to be filled with fierce arguments and talks of psychiatry. The only difference that was made to her desk was that her name plate was removed one day - DI Drake no longer worked at Fenchurch East. Gene showed no sign that he had realised the plate had been moved, but the team new that he noticed. His eyes would fix absentmindedly on the place where it used to sit and he'd often be filling in paperwork and suddenly look up to call Alex over to do it or go over a case and the absence of her name was almost as strong a reminder as the absence of the woman 'd be struck with the fact that Alex Drake was no longer sat waiting for him to call her into his office and he'd hesitate for a second, then lower his head back to the paperwork that lay on his desk. It took not weeks or months, but years for the presence of Alex Drake to fade. But as all memories that you swear you will remember vividly tend to do, she did eventually begin to blur, small details beginning to swirl into eachtoher. She became more of a legend than a memory around the station, and as new people began to replace the old, not many people could remember her face anymore, but they were all told about her. They all knew the story of Bolly. Until - they didn't. Time heals all wounds, even if you don't want it to and eventually Gene became able to walk past her desk without feeling his stomach lurch. Then, in desperate need of a stapler and under pressure to get his paperwork finished, a DC used the one off her desk one day and it was never returned. On becoming pregnant, a WPC had placed her congratulatory flowers on Drakes desk so as not to take up all the room on her own. And soon, Gene was finding himself wonder why, when in thought and searching for an answer to a case or question, he always found himself staring through his glass box at the old desk and, 9 times out of 10, coming up with the answer with in a couple of minutes. He knew that there was an unwritten rule that noone used that desk anymore. Noone claimed it for their own and he knew that for as long as this was his kingdom, he wouldn't let anybody even consider doing so - but the reasons for his adamancy that the rule be enforced were frustratingly illusive. In the evenings, Gene would sit alone. He'd always been alone, really. An endless stream of souls to help but none to break the heavy weight on his shoulders. Face became face became face. DI became DI became DI. He forgot them all in the end. Some he clung to for longer; these were the good ones. The honest ones. The smart, fiesty, ballsy, bloody-good-copper ones. They were few and far between, Gene was sure, but he knew that they had been in his little world. For a while. When he dwelled on it, it frustrated him that he could no longer remember their faces or their names. He felt he were betraying them in a sort of way. He'd once heard someone - in fact it may have been one of the bloody illusive DI's themselves - say that a person dies twice; once physically and the next when their name is said for the last time. It seemed hauntingly fitting to Gene as he sat grasping at the translucent names of his past detective inspectors in an attempt to save the lost souls from dying the final death. The glass of overpriced, nancy champaign that he occasionally indulged in twisted under his fingers as he grasped at one name that danced just out of reach. This one he should not have forgotten, he knew that much. He was angry at himself for letting this one slip away - he'd promised that he wouldn't. But shattered promises were the foundation of Gene Hunts world and he had learnt to deal with that a long time ago. So for now, he gives up and sips on his glass of Bollinger. For a while Gene had held onto Alex for dear life. And then she, like all the others, had slipped away from him like smoke caught in a breeze. For a while it had been the Guv and Bolly. Un-bloody-breakable. But that was over now. 


End file.
